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Returning in the
Spring from Japan, a nation struggling to come to terms with its imperial past,
I was shocked at the rise of unabashed imperial nostalgia in the UK. The Empire
appeared to be striking back and had found an audience with affluent Asians and
other post-colonial minorities alienated by perceived favouritism shown to
white European migrants. Indeed, a
post-colonial argument could be made for the Brexit. Britain’s continued
membership of the EU, it could be argued, strengthens its ‘European’ white
Christian identity at the expense of its multicultural, post-imperial past. A
closer examination of that past, would reveal that the wounds inflicted by
centuries of colonial exploitation and racism have not yet healed and are
obscured by successive waves of migrants from eastern Europe. Taking the
country back, meant reasserting the primacy of the colonial bond to British
identity. Allied with the Marxist
argument that the EU, which had its roots in the Treaty of Rome in 1957,
foisted a capitalist, supranational institutional architecture on the continent
which effectively made ‘socialism in one country’ impossible, a powerful case
could be made for Brexit as a ‘progressive’ act.

What is lacking in
such an analysis is the very violence which the Brexit inflicted upon those
European nationals who have chosen to make the UK their home. Most contribute
to society by paying taxes and providing services which British nationals are
either unwilling or unable to provide. Many came not explicitly to find work
but to study, then settled and have come to call the UK home. One such European
national is my mother who has lived in the UK years for half a century. Like my
father, a naturalized British citizen of South Asian origin, she never felt
British (although she feels more British than my father does), but is attached
to her family, her community and her adopted city. Why should she naturalize?
If the nation is an imagined community as Benedict Anderson has argued, why
place limits on our imagination? Sovereignty cannot be taken back as the nation
was never sovereign.